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Have you studied the rules of Internet marketing, applied them to the design and construction of your website, submitted it to the major search engines, but still are getting no business? The lack of business probably has something to do with your site's position on the lists returned by search engines.
A list is often more than 20 pages long and can contain hundreds of URLs relating to the required product or service. Research shows that people rarely look beyond the first 30 listings. Indeed, many glance at even fewer. So, although your site is registered with all the major search engines, it will only get attention if it is ranked somewhere in the top 30 positions, or better still, the top 10 positions.
So how do you achieve this top 10 ranking? Often the answer is 'with difficulty' - 'on a trial and error basis'. It depends to some extent on how many sites are competing with yours for position. It also depends on how closely your site conforms to the search engine rules.
Even experienced webmasters can't be 100% certain, because search engines do not publish all of the rules governing how they rate and rank sites. This means that webmasters must constantly scrutinise high ranking sites, analyse their construction and deduce how, why or what got them into that position.
In addition, the rules that we do know, differ from one search engine to another and vary from time to time. The following table attempts to summarise some points that you may wish to take into account when attempting to improve your ranking on these search engines.
| Search Engine Parameters | Yahoo | Yellow Pages | Open Source | Excite | Alta Vista | Infoseek | HotBot | Web Crawler | What useek | AOL Netfind | MSN | Lycos
|
| No of pages to submit
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 1+
| all
| 1
| 1+
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 1+
| Days before pages indexed
| 50+
| 2
| 5+
| 14
| 3
| 1+
| 21
| 14
| 5
| 14
| 28
| 14
| Spider will index your site
| no
| no
| no
| yes
| yes
| no
| yes
| yes
| yes
| yes
| yes
| yes
| Searches are case sensitive
| no
| no
| ?
| no
| yes
| yes
| no
| no
| ?
| no
| no
| no
| Uses meta tags
| no
| no
| no
| no
| yes
| yes
| yes
| no
| ?
| no
| yes
| no
| Restricts to submission form
| yes
| yes
| yes
| no
| no
| no
| no
| no
| no
| no
| no
| no
| Links to site improve ranking
| no
| no
| no
| yes
| yes
| yes
| ?
| yes
| no
| ?
| yes
| yes
| |
Warning: Because the web is constantly changing, and top 10 positioning is highly competitive, ideally, you should check your ranking on each search engine every week, and certainly once a month, at least. You can then take immediate action when your position is usurped.
Alternatively, if your time is precious, and you want to spend it running your business, let us monitor and maintain your site for you. Our combination of powerful technology, business experience and Internet intelligence allows our growing number of clients to enjoy economies of scale that result in real savings of time, money and effort.
Contact us now for our free survey report on your website together with details of special offers on website promotion, website maintenance and site administration services.